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Pâte Brisée Pie or Quiche Crust

Sarah found this recipe online and we’ve lifted it directly from there with no modifications at all. It is wonderful: easy and tasty for both dessert pies and savory quiches, and we’ve verified that now with a couple of fruit pies and a quiche experiment of our own. Best part: the recipe makes enough for two pie crusts, which means you can freeze one lump of dough for later use, or make a double-crust pie, or do some pretty lattice work.

250 grams of flour (1 and 3/4 cups or a little over 1/2 pound, unbleached, all-purpose)

125 grams of unsalted butter (1 stick)

1 egg

1 tea spoon of crème fraîche (or sour cream if you can’t find it)

1/2 tea spoon of salt

The base ingredients are the flour, salt and butter. The egg and crème fraîche are here to help them stick together (plus the egg will give the crust a nice golden color).

First sift the flour over a large bowl and add the salt.

Cut the butter in tiny cubes. Incorporate the butter to the flour with your fingertips (you can’t really use a spoon here… You could use a pastry blender but you’d lose all the fun of making your own ‘pâte brisée’). The dough will feel like coarse sand grains between your fingers.

Push the flour and butter mix on the sides of the bowl, digging a hole in the center. Break the egg and pour it in the hole in middle of the bowl. Beat it a little with a fork then use a wooden spoon to incorporate the flour little by little.

Add the crème fraîche or sour cream and mix again until the dough is homogeneous. Use your hands to knead the dough and form two balls of the same weight.

Place the balls of dough in plastic wraps and let them rest in the fridge for at least 1 hour before using or freezing. Let the dough warm up a little before rolling it out.

Also, scaling up the recipe by a factor of 1.25 or 1.5 will help those less gifted with the rolling pin get good solid coverage on a thick-enough bottom crust. Thank you, metric system, for being so scalable!